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"Pre-Crime" Comes To the HR Dept.
storagedude writes "Like something out of the Steven Spielberg movie Minority Report, a startup called Social Intelligence is mining social media to weed out job applicants based on their potential for violence, drug abuse or just plain bad judgment. The startup also combs sites like Facebook and Twitter to monitor current employees, presumably to monitor compliance with company social media policy, but as the criteria are company-defined, anything's possible. Just one more reason to watch what you post, folks."
Parent is 100% correct. The score is completely dependent on your financial transactional activities
There is no "magic" key or bias
Disclaimer: I work for FICO.
It's these low end "background checks" and "clearances" that suck. I used to be in the aerospace business, working for a company that did business with the 3-letter agencies. I've been through the clearance process for the higher level clearances. At that level, there are real background checks, where Government investigators go out and quiz your neighbors, friends, previous employers, and creditors in person. Fingerprints are taken and checked. Police records are checked. Birth certificates are checked; not only do you have to show yours, they check it against the hospital birth records. There are interrogations, lie detector tests, and an interview with a shrink. The whole process takes about a year.
But because the high level clearance process is reasonably thorough, it's not as random as the low-end stuff. It's not "competitive", in the hiring sense. There's a limited list of things the security people worry about, and they're the items that, historically, have caused people to sell or give secrets to the enemy - relatives in an enemy country, vulnerability to blackmail, financial problems, gambling or drug or alcohol abuse history. They don't care if your Facebook page makes you look like a jerk.
But won't "watching what we post" only serve to lessen the dilution of social media "behaviour", making it even easier for classifiers to pick out outliers?
Put another way, if we act ashamed of ourselves and play cards close to the chest, won't this simply encourage conformal social behaviour and help to undo the social upheaval of the 60's?
In other words, while I agree that making yourself look stupid on the internet is not the smartest move, I would also say that asking everyone to "watch what they say" for fear of future repercussion sounds somewhat doubleplusungood to me.
In other words, we need to figure how to let teenagers be teenagers. It scares me, but I agree with Eric Schmidt that it might one day be necessary to let people change their name when they get to a certain age, similar to how we let people clean their criminal record at 18.